Historically, media content was distributed to users via large media organizations (e.g., TV Channels, newspaper, etc.) that often segmented users in regional markets, releasing new content in a controlled way. Hence, video popularity was seldom a global phenomenon, as users could not access the same content all over the world. With the advent of online video sharing platforms, these regional barriers have been removed, making all content items accessible from all over the globe.
Research has shown that video popularity on video sharing platforms exhibit a “long-tail” behavior, where some videos are able to accumulate hundreds of millions of views, whereas the vast majority can only attract a few views. However, this unbalanced skew of video popularity serves a purpose: users are able to discover and enjoy millions of videos about niche topics in which they are interested, even though each individual video might not accrue a large number of overall views.
Geographic relevance of a video may be a powerful factor impacting video popularity. For instance, topics like sports, politics, and news tend to have a spatial focus of interest. In addition, language and culture also tend to constrain the propagation of videos to a global audience. As such, the geographic scope of a video might well be constrained to web users in a limited geographic region. Furthermore, geographic locality also has an impact on systems and infrastructure. Understanding how and where users watch videos on video sharing platforms is useful across several domains, such as building predictive modules of user interest and recommending systems. In a similar way, geographic locality can impact geographically distributed content delivery systems and data centers.
Some video sharing platforms have provided technology that allows users of the video sharing platform to see video views broken down by country. However, these technologies do not take into consideration the geographic location attached to the video itself or the popularity of the video locally versus globally.